October 28, 2019
Here among the flowers I lie/Laughing everlastingly.
India's Roopkund is a lake filled with hundreds of skeletons. Previous study had concluded that everyone had been killed by a catastrophic hailstorm, but new research indicates that the skeletons are not all from the same time period or even the same geographic area. What killed the visitors to Skeleton Lake?
The kid is out of the picture
In the dark times / Will there also be singing?
Jonathan Glazer unexpectedly releases new short film on BBC2 "According to an interview with the Guardian, the piece was inspired directly by an image of Donald Trump’s sons trophy hunting big game, as well as the work of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. Glazer is also preparing to shoot his first feature for seven years, a Holocaust drama set in Auschwitz." [more inside]
dying isn’t just about the one person doing the dying
A Woman’s Work: Till Death Do Us Part: Carolita Johnson considers the emotional and physical labor required of women as their loved ones die. [Longreads] "I’ve come to understand [...] dying isn’t just about the one person doing the dying. It’s an undertaking woven by and around many people, and this has a certain beauty." [more inside]
What one fool can do, another can.
The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics — and they are mostly clever fools — seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are... Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. [more inside]
Making yourself a home
A man who sits at his computer and makes a MetaFilter post.
Japan's Best Boring Halloween Costumes [Kotaku] “...at this annual event in Japan, participants are trying to do something far simpler—boring, even. This event is called “Jimi Halloween” (地味ハロウィン), with jimi (地味) meaning “mundane,” “plain,” or “subdued.” [...] Here are some of the best mundane costumes: Someone who cannot get a seat at the food court in the mall. The costume of a person wearing black clothing that has played with a cat. This woman is dressed as a person who is taking a photo of a meal. The person who cleans the escalator’s handrail. Someone about to win Old Maid. This man is dressed as a right-handed person. A person who is drinking a hot beverage. This is a costume of a person who would get mistaken as store staff at an eyeglasses shop. A person who has just purchased an umbrella the moment it stops raining. A guy who can’t find where his seat is at the baseball stadium.”
Revolutionary art to propel history forward.
“ The artwork will involve hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. The reenactment, the culmination of a period of organizing and preparation, will take place upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—the exurban communities and industry that have replaced the sugar plantations will be its backdrop. The reenactment will be an impressive and startling sight—hundreads of Black re-enactors, many on horses, flags flying, in 19th-century French colonial garments, singing in Creole and English to African drumming.“ On November 8-9, 2019, hundreds of re-enactors will retrace the path of the largest slave rebellion in United States history, embodying a story of resistance, freedom and revolutionary action.
Considering the wishes and rights of the dead
[On Oct. 18, 2019], Prince’s estate surprise-dropped an acoustic demo (YouTube) of a 20-year-old Prince singing a sparse version of “I Feel For You,” the song Chaka Khan would later turn into a comeback hit in 1984 (YT). [...] Is the recording good? Undoubtedly. [...] What’s less clear? Whether we should have access to this recording, an early unfinished work by a notoriously private artist, at all. Reckoning with the Ethics of the Ever-Unfurling Prince Vault -- The demos, b-sides and rarities keep coming. How should we feel about listening? (Katie Cameron for Paste Magazine) Related: Rights of the Dead, a legal article by Kirsten Rabe Smolensky (full article PDF).
After the Fall of the Glossy Magazine, What's Left of Condé Nast?
Reeves Wiedeman at NY Mag gazes into the future of Condé Nast (Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ, Pitchfork...) under Anna Wintour and a new CEO. "On the sales side, magazines were combined into clusters — one includes both Teen Vogue and The New Yorker. A once-cohesive magazine might now have people spread out over three or four floors of the building. It certainly reduced the internecine warfare, but at the price of everyone feeling they were on the same brand team. Shortly after the hubbing, a Creative Group employee tacked a pale-pink Post-it on a wall in the office, summing up their feelings on the situation: WE ARE CREATIVES, NOT 2ND CLASS CITIZENS."
How many outs? Baseball playoff graphics compared
Jason Snell of Six Colors takes a look at the on-screen graphics used by the various broadcasters of the Major League Baseball playoffs, and finds that "With the exception of MLB Network, which needs to go back to the woodshed, these are all graphics packages worth applauding."
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